We are delighted to announce the IAS Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows for 2021–2022. 

Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows spend a year in residence at the IAS. Together with our Faculty Fellows and Scholars in Residence, they constitute a supportive interdisciplinary intellectual community in which they work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas.

We look forward to welcoming each of these scholars to our fellows community!

Harsha Anantharaman

“The Paradox of Inclusion: The Politics of Caste, Recognition, & Infrastructure Reform in Urban India”
Department of Geography, Environment, & Society
College of Liberal Arts
Mentor: Hoon Song

In response to the political-economic processes of neoliberalization—privatization, disinvestment in public-goods, casualization of labor-relations—which are reshaping the world of work, scholars and activists have articulated a politics of recognition intended to secure social recognition for marginalized occupations, and the vulnerable populations dependent on them. Emphasizing their vital socio-economic contributions, these efforts have particularly prioritized governmental recognition, and its attendant protections—citizenship, documentation, secure employment. However, as I have begun to document, the formalization of waste-picking, and the politics of recognition on which it is premised, can have the paradoxical effect of further endangering wastepickers’ socio-economic freedoms. I investigate this “paradox of inclusion” in my proposed research.
 

Nina Medvedeva

“Home in the Sharing Economy”
Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies
College of Liberal Arts
Mentor: Michael Goldman

Debates about short-term rentals (STRs) like Airbnb have exploded in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington DC—three of the United States’ largest STR markets. My dissertation traces how STRs change residents’ understandings of home, impact access to urban housing stock, create new regulatory structures of governance, and operate within broader structures of race and gender under capitalism. Taking STR activism since 2010 as its central object, this dissertation asks: How does a monetization of home become a normalized state of affairs and when does it unravel as a contested site?